Top stories concerning British Isles ancestral research from Irish born Scottish based professional family historian, author and tutor Chris Paton. Feel free to quote from this blog, but please credit British GENES if you do so. Should you wish to get in touch, contact me at christopherpaton @ tiscali.co.uk. Happy hunting!

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Saturday, 17 November 2012

Durham Records Online - new records & price and search changes

This is an abridged version of a considerably longer press release from Durham Records Online (www.durhamrecordsonline.com), but hopefully keeps the main points!

What's New at Durham Records Online:

Very detailed Sunderland marriage banns 1816-1823
893 marriage banns at Sunderland Holy Trinity from 8 Dec 1816 to 25 May 1823. These banns are very unusual and interesting because they include information about the bride and groom that is not found in their marriage records.

Heworth marriages 1896-1908
618 marriages at Heworth St. Mary in Gateshead district covering 1896-1908. These are fully-detailed civil-registration-era marriages.

Price increase for fully-detailed civil-registration-era marriages
Fully-detailed civil-registration-era (after 1 July 1837) marriages now cost 2 credits, or twice the price of an individual record if you are using the shopping cart to pay cash for records. We have long been aware that it takes our transcribers considerably longer to type in these lengthy records, complete with bride’s and groom’s ages, fathers, fathers’ occupations, and witnesses. Charging a little more for these records allows us to compensate the transcribers more fairly for their efforts, but we feel still offers good value for our clients. If you pay cash, the price for a single civil-registration-style marriage is now £3 or $4.50, which is still less than 1/3 of what the Registrar’s Office would charge for the same document, and at Durham Records Online, you get the transcription instantly instead of having to wait for a week or two.

Norton Society of Friends burials 1866-1905
23 burials at the tiny Society of Friends (Quakers) burial ground in Norton, Stockton district, from June 1866 to March 1905. Abodes mentioned are Billingham, Coatham, Norton, Smelt House near Howden, Stockton, and Wolviston.

Chester-le-Street baptisms 1813-1851: all details filled in
Hurray ! We have finished filling in all the details for 12,092 baptisms at Chester-le-Street covering 1813-1851. If you have ordered any records from our pre-1852 Chester-le-Street collection, you will know that you immediately get a terse form of the record – an index entry – and then, a few days later, we fill in the details and send you the revised record. Well, for baptisms, there will be no more waiting for details! (We are now hard at work filling in the details of the Chester-le-Street marriage collection, and then will move on to burials.) If you have purchased a baptism at Chester-le-Street in this period, we recommend you take another look at it to see if anything has been added or changed.

Dalton-le-Dale baptisms & burials for 1798-1812 updated
Added missing details to the following records at Dalton-le-Dale in Easington district:
Baptisms 1798-1812 - father’s occupations were added. ‘Illegitimate’ was added if it had been omitted.
Burials 1798-1812 - death dates and father’s occupations were added, and in some cases, more details of an address.

Witnesses added to Bishopwearmouth marriages 1813-1837
Added 8,725 witnesses to our existing 4,202 marriages at Bishopwearmouth St. Michael & All Angels, covering 1813 to mid-1837 when civil registration started. We have also added any missing details, such as whether the marriages were by banns or licence, a few marital statuses, and we corrected some minor spelling errors in names and place names.

Search with Event Year & Range now works for censuses; other changes to the search form
We have made some changes to the search form to enable more tightly-targeted search results.